“Strike one.”
I can’t do this. “I guessed.”
“Strike two.”
“It’s not as if Steve is an unusual name. I could just as easily have said Mike or Dave. Scott. Mark or, you know, Matthew, Luke, or John.”
“Strike three. Now the truth.”
Like an evil spirit leaving my body, the urge to fight evaporates. I don’t want to be a detective anymore. Surely there are easier ways to make a living. And technically I’m not even making a living. “All right, here’s the truth. I’ve been following you, not stalking you. My name is Iris. Iris Hedge. I’m sort of a detective. I was hired a few weeks ago by”—my voice cracks—“your wife.”
Steve starts to laugh.
It isn’t a happy laugh—more a rusty, off-balance caw. It’s the sort of laugh people laugh when life has become so awful there’s nothing left to do. “Haaaa! Ha! Ha! Haaaaaaa!” Finally, he stops and sits on the step below me. When he speaks, I have to strain to hear him. “You’ve spoken with her.”
“Well, yes, sure.” I reach down for Rocky. He’s surprisingly soft, and his head fits nicely in my palm. I pat him, and he leans against my calf.
Steve’s face is drained of color. “My wife,” he says, “is crazy.”
This time it’s my turn for the life-is-ridiculous laugh.
Steve must read my concurrence between the lines, because he relaxes his posture slightly. Still, his skin remains ashen. “What did she hire you to do, exactly?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“It’s either me now or my lawyer later.”
It’s the word “lawyer” that does it. I crumble instantly. “She hired me to check up on you to see if you’re doing what you say you’re doing.” The words are practically jumping over themselves to get out of my mouth. “I guess she doesn’t think you are. You aren’t going to tell her about this, are you?” Right, sure. He’s going to go home tonight and keep this little mishap to himself. Vickie will have my head.
“What, exactly, doesn’t she think I’m doing?”
I’m trying to keep it vague. “What you say you’re doing.”
“Which is what?”
“Let’s put it this way. She wonders if you truly are, you know, to be trusted.”
“When have I ever given her any indication that I’m not trustworthy? Did you ask her that?”
I’m dying to say, “Why would she trust you?” Instead I fix him with what I hope is a steely grimace. Under the tough act, I’m ready to cry.
“And—Iris, is it?—what have you been telling my wife?”
“The truth. I haven’t caught you doing anything, you know, wrong. Anything untrustworthy.”
“Well, well. Not doing anything wrong. What a disappointment that has to be.”
“I said I haven’t caught you doing anything wrong. I didn’t say you weren’t doing anything wrong.” As a matter of fact, he’s just now provided me with plenty to be suspicious about. The mysterious disappearing Jack Russell terrier, the missing wedding ring, and the line about getting his affairs in order, for starters. But that’s for him and Vickie to work out now.
Steve shakes his head, hard. “That woman owes me a big apology, considering the way she’s treated me. But she has no sense of duty to anyone but herself. So that leaves you to clean up this mess. And though I’d rather never see your face again, you’re to meet me here in the park Monday afternoon, two o’clock sharp, by the statue of Daniel Webster. I’m choosing that location because it’s near my lawyer’s office. If you don’t show up, I can walk straight there and discuss with him what we can prosecute the two of you for. Do I make myself clear?”
My face is on fire. “As far as today, though, should I, um, tell her about this, or do you want to?”
“Don’t you dare breathe a word of this to her. Do you understand? As far as you’re concerned, nothing unusual happened today. You saw me running in Central Park; that’s it. And in case you were planning to follow me to work, too, don’t bother. I’ll be there, as always, making money that will go straight to her, as always. She can call me there herself if she doesn’t believe me. She knows the number.”
I’m surprisingly calm as I cross the black and tan diamond-patterned terrazzo floor in the lobby of Vickie’s building, past spiny plants in silvery pots, give my name at the front desk, and wait twelve centuries as the doorman dials upstairs and stands with the desk phone to his ear. Though he’s got the receiver, I can hear Vickie’s line ringing and ringing. What’s taking her so long? She knows I’m coming; I called first. I look out the lobby windows. The morning’s clouds have broken up, and in the building’s private garden two babysitters socialize while a boy and a girl nearby chase after a big yellow ball.
“Hector!” A grandfatherly man steps up next to me, lays a tennis racquet on the desk, and reaches across to clap the doorman on the shoulder. “Can you do something about this weather, Hector? It’s sweltering!”
It’s seventy-seven degrees. I read it on a digital billboard clock on the way over.
“Wait till August, eh, Hector?” the man goes on. “Hell on Earth. That’s why God made the Hamptons, Hector, right?”
“Miss Iris to see you,” Hector says into the phone. He replaces the receiver and gives me the nod to go up.
Apartment 12-C, Chez Sokolov, is at the end of a long corridor with beige-on-beige carpet and wallpaper and a lineup of indistinguishable doors. Vickie answers my knock casually dressed in a pressed pink oxford shirt—untucked, perhaps to accommodate her slightly thicker middle—chinos, and driving moccasins. When she sees my hair, she lets out a little scream.
My stomach lurches. The woman has no compassion. When she hears what happened this morning, she’s going to tear me to pieces.
She composes herself. “I still don’t see why you had to deliver your bill to me in person.”
“I have a matter to discuss. May I come in?” I try to step into the apartment. She blocks me with one hand flat against my chest, looks up and down the empty corridor, and stage-whispers, “Promise me he won’t catch you here. I have no idea where he is. I haven’t heard from him all day.”
“Why are you whispering?” I stage-whisper back. “I told you. He’s at the office, at his desk.”
“How can you know that? Did you follow him?” she asks in her normal voice.
“No.” I know because he told me after I blew my cover. “I called there pretending to be a client,” I lie, “and his secretary told me he was there but tied up in phone meetings for the rest of the afternoon. May I come in?”
Vickie seems appeased but doesn’t remove her hand from my chest. “This is a shoe-free home. Before you enter, would you?”
I silently curse Vickie and wrestle off my decrepit sneakers, balancing first on one sweaty foot, then on the other. I didn’t think to wear socks, so I cross my right foot behind my left to hide my unpolished toes, and fix my eyes jealously on Vickie’s pristine moccasins.
“They’re just-for-the-house shoes. I don’t even wear them to take the garbage down the hall,” she explains. “You never know what kind of slime you’re stepping in out there. We wipe the dog’s feet when he comes in.”
“Where is the dog, by the way?” I’m still wondering why Steve was Jack Russell terrier-less again this morning.
“He’s at his playgroup.” Vickie leads me into the living room and demonstrates that one can see the East River if one stands to the left of the sofa, tilts one’s head, and squints. But the apartment’s truly notable feature, besides that I could easily fit three of mine into it, is its disarray. The living room walls are bare except for the nails that must have held the framed photos and artwork now stacked on the dining table; at the top of the stack is a gauzy black-and-white portrait of Vickie in her wedding dress. Drop cloths cover the china cabinet and dining chairs, and a rolled-up carpet leans into a corner. Vickie makes a face. “Remodeling. What a nightmare.” She walks to the dining area and extends her arms like
a game-show prize presenter in a sparkly gown. “We’re putting a wall here and a door over there and making this space Steve’s study. We need the second bedroom back for the nursery.” Her words echo off the bare walls. “We should have bought a three-bedroom right from the start. Isn’t that what you would have done? Better to grow into an apartment than out of it.”
I could live happily in just the space allotted to the china cabinet.
“Where was I?” Vickie looks around the apartment. “He used to eat away at the corner of the sofa whenever I left the house.”
Steve?
“Separation anxiety, the vet said. Now I drop him at this place on York after lunch and pick him up at five. It’s an all-Parson Russell facility, so he’s around others like himself. You should see the change in his attitude. Plus, he takes a little doggie Prozac.”
Right. The dog. Maybe I just misheard her when she said Steve always takes it running.
She sits on a striped brocade wing chair and gives me one of those “make yourself comfortable” hostess nods. Easy to be magnanimous when you’re the one in the position of power, wearing the shoes. I alight on the edge of the matching sofa and tuck my feet under the dust ruffle. Out of the blue, I’m hungry. I was too rushed to eat before I went to find Steve in Central Park, and too nervous afterward. You’d think Vickie would offer me a cookie or something—at least, before she finds out why I’m here.
“So . . .” She claps her hands together, indicating that the social part of our meeting is over.
My heart pounds. From the pocket of my sweatpants I pull a slightly rumpled, folded square of paper—my six-hundred-dollar bill for one full week of fruitless detective work. I give it to Vickie, knowing that the odds of seeing any of that money are only slightly greater than the odds of getting a call from Michelle Heeley begging me to come back at twice my former salary. “What I wanted to tell you is, I’m resigning.”
Vickie frowns at me. “What for?”
I tuck my toes more deeply under the dust ruffle. “It just isn’t working out. I’m not giving you what you want. I thought we could settle the bill and call it even.” I wait for Vickie to go get her purse. She doesn’t.
“Well,” she sighs. “You said you saw him in the park this morning, just jogging as always. But did you notice anything unusual? Think back. Surely there’s something, maybe something tiny, but important.”
“Not really.” I can’t wait, can’t wait, to get out of here.
Vickie looks disappointed. It becomes clear at this moment that tossing her some tidbit of information might be my one shot at getting paid. I can’t repeat Steve’s “getting my affairs in order” line because she’d wonder how I’d come to hear it. But I could tell her what I saw. “Actually there was one thing. Didn’t you say he always runs with the dog?”
“Yes, right. He does.”
“Because the dog hasn’t always been with him. He wasn’t there today.”
“Snooky wasn’t with him?” She looks shocked. I am shocked, too—that the Steve I sort-of know would own a dog named Snooky. “But I saw the two of them come back in this morning. If the dog wasn’t jogging, where could Steve possibly—no!” Vickie claps her hand over her mouth, then continues talking through it, a note of hysteria creeping into her voice. “You don’t think that while he works out he’s—oh, my God—leaving my precious Snooky at some slut’s apartment?”
“No, no, no, no.” It seems far-fetched, even to my overblown imagination. “I assume he just tied him to a fence somewhere.”
“Tied Snooky to a fence? Alone? So any weirdo could walk by and kidnap him? Oh, my God!”
“Not that, then. But I’ll bet there is a simple and perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“Which I won’t ever find out, Iris, because you’re quitting on me! My husband’s a cheater and a dog-neglecter and I’ll never know the truth! Oh, my God!” She bends forward at the waist and buries her face in her hands. My stomach roils as I imagine what might happen to me if, despite having sworn me to secrecy, Steve comes home tonight and tells Vickie all about his and my little surprise meeting. You can’t think that way, I tell myself. You’ll give yourself an ulcer.
After a while Vickie raises her head and takes a breath. “Oh, God,” she whimpers. “I feel sick.” Truly, she doesn’t look so good. Her eternally rosy cheeks are as pale as Steve’s face was this morning. “Is there more? There’s more, I know it. You tell me, right now.”
Maybe I’ll keep the part about the missing wedding ring to myself. What if she gets so upset she loses the baby? “That’s it, really.”
Vickie’s mouth droops. The sun shining in through the windows highlights faint purple shadows under her eyes and minuscule cracks in the concealer she’s used to cover them. She rubs an invisible smudge off one of her tastefully short, whisper-pink manicured nails. “I wish,” she says in a weary monotone, “there was someone to tell husbands how to treat their wives.”
I’m heavyhearted as I leave. Somewhere under my general feeling of failure I should be happy to be free of Vickie, but there’s little to be pleased about. My stupid gamble didn’t even pay off; she claimed to have no cash on hand, so I fear I’ll never see a cent of the money she owes me. I still have no real job prospects. And I have to meet Steve Monday. Will he go easy on me or have me arrested?
But the walk home through the park is a nice distraction. It’s turned into a dazzling day, bright and breezy. Suspended above the treetops are a few clouds so sublime in their puffy whiteness they appear to have been placed there by a decorator. The yellowy-green buds of early spring have given way to mature leaves and lush emerald lawns dotted with clover. White butterflies flutter past as I walk. Deep inside the park, the streets are closed to traffic, and the noise of the city is a world away. Beyond the treetops a coronet of skyscrapers stands out against the brilliant blue sky. I cross to the West Side but find myself walking past my exit and turning south toward the baseball diamonds near Tavern on the Green. Two teams are playing a game, getting a head start on the weekend. I climb into the bleachers in the shade of an oak tree and watch and listen to the men alternately encourage and heckle each other in English and Spanish. They remind me of Teddy—unaffected by society’s insistence that people work on a spring afternoon this glorious.
“A walk’s as good as a run, baby; a walk’s as good as a run!” someone calls to his teammate at bat, but the batter sends the ball soaring in a high arc. His team whoops as the player rounds third base and slides into home plate, joyously, gracefully, as if his entire life has been a series of choices and decisions and random events all leading up to this moment, and he didn’t know it until now.
At home I find a message on my machine. Could this be an interview call? I hold my breath and push the button.
“Namaste!” Joy’s voice floats into the room. “Just calling about the New Age Expo!”
I exhale, press “Skip,” and dial Val, who hasn’t called me, despite having been back from her trip for two days. “Why didn’t you tell me Vickie was pregnant?”
“Didn’t I? I thought I did.”
“No, Val, you didn’t.”
“Well, she only told me a couple of weeks ago. I guess she was waiting until she got out of the first semester.”
“Trimester.”
“Whatever,” Val says. “Is this why you called?”
I explain that I’m no longer working for Vickie, expecting Val to ask for details. She launches into an exhaustive account of her last four dates, in two days, with four different men.
I stare up into my storage loft, a four-foot-high balcony-style crawl space in my apartment, above the kitchen and bathroom. The realtor who showed me the apartment said the loft was for sleeping. “You see? You put your mattress there,” she called up to me, “and free up thirty square feet in your living area.” I looked down at her from behind the balcony railing several feet above her head, accessible only by a rickety ladder. At twenty-three, sleeping in a loft would hav
e been an adventure. At thirty-three it would be life-threatening. And I could see that this tiny apartment wouldn’t hold all the possessions I’d brought from California. “I’ll use the loft for storage,” I told her. Then I wrote her a check.
As Val continues her monologue, I find myself thinking, I really should look for that corkscrew. And before I know it I’m hunched over in the loft, holding the phone to my ear and using a fork to pick the tape off a moving box labeled “Kitch.” Yet there’s nothing in it from my former kitchen. I find the crushed, powdery remains of a dried rose from my wedding bouquet, and several framed photographs wrapped in layers of moving paper: Photographs of Teddy and me visiting his mother in La Jolla, hugging each other in front of the polar bears at the San Diego Zoo. One of my mother and father in the late seventies, on someone’s sailboat in Newport Beach. In the photo my mother is every inch the hippie in bell-bottom cords and a crinkly cotton tunic embroidered with flowers and mushrooms; my father, in his white canvas hat, blue oxford shirt, and slacks, plays the uptight-establishment role. It seems obvious now, looking at them, that they were unsuited for each other, but they were young and happy that day. They didn’t know their marriage would end, or how, or that less than a year after it did, my dad would die in an ambulance on its way to West Valley Hospital, clutching his heart.
“. . . which reminds me.” Val appears to have come to the end of her dating chronicles. “You need to get back out there yourself. Go out with some fresh meat. Sure, you have Kevin, but that’s, what, once a month?”
I pull out a small, heart-shaped bed pillow with a circular stain where Teddy once rested a cup of coffee. “I don’t want to get back out there. I’m through with love.”
“I’m talking about cheap, meaningless sex,” Val corrects me. “Who said anything about love?”
ELEVEN
On Monday at a quarter to two, I enter the park directly across the street from the Dakota, the ornate, turreted apartment building where John Lennon lived and in front of which, years ago, he was gunned down. Fans still come to cry at the John Lennon memorial in a clearing right inside the park. On this warm, damp afternoon, this is where I end up myself, lost. “Do you know where the Daniel Webster statue is?” I ask a woman at a card table, who’s hawking CDs of herself reading her own Lennon-inspired poetry. Behind her a man sinks to his knees to lay a plastic-wrapped rose on a sun-shaped tile mosaic with the word “Imagine” in its center.
It's About Your Husband Page 11